Find out what your customers actually want.
Then build it, knowing the answer comes from real, identified racegoers and not a rented sample or a generalist agency that has never watched a race.
Courseside is an independent consultancy for UK and Irish racecourses, backed by the Collective: a structured panel of real racegoers and racing-curious non-attenders, built and run in-house.
Most course revenue concentrates into a handful of festival days. The strategic task — growing attendance across the rest of the year and converting the racing-curious who have never set foot on a course — requires knowing what that audience actually wants before you spend on building it. The L0 tier in the panel below, people who are curious but haven't yet come, is exactly that audience: the conversion opportunity most courses have never had a direct line to.
A panel of our own
Courseside runs the Collective, a free-membership panel of UK and Irish racegoers and racing-curious non-attenders profiled across five literacy tiers. Members are real, identified people — not a sample drawn from a rented database, not a panel you share with twelve other clients. It is being built from scratch, one application at a time. With their consent, members will be acknowledged by first name and region in every published report — the format being first name, initial, region. Their individual survey answers are always anonymised — what you see in the findings is aggregate patterns, never personal attribution.
| Tier | Who they are |
|---|---|
| L0 | Never attended. Racing-curious. The conversion opportunity. |
| L1 | Attended once or twice. Occasion-driven. High lapse risk. |
| L2 | Regular attender. Follows the sport at a surface level. |
| L3 | Engaged follower. Reads form, has trainers or yards they follow. |
| L4 | Industry-fluent. Works in or closely adjacent to racing. |
The quarterly published report will go to every Collective member, every named contact at UK and Irish racecourses on the Courseside distribution list, and the racing trade press. The first edition follows the launch survey. If you would like it when it lands, reply to this page's contact address and you will be on the list.
Four things we sell
Each engagement is scoped per project. All carry the same money-back guarantee — see Risk reversal below.
Mystery Racegoer
Between one and six Collective members complete a structured review of a fixture, a hospitality space, or a customer segment of your choice. Each reviewer is matched by tier and profile to the segment you need. Written report and verbal debrief delivered within 14 working days of the final visit.
Concept and Design
A pre-launch sense-check on a hospitality refit, a new fixture format, or a ticket experiment. We pressure-test the concept against the Collective panel before you spend the build budget. Delivered in three to eight weeks.
Inclusion and Accessibility
A formal audit of how your race-day experience reads to under-represented groups: women, families, disabled racegoers, first-time visitors. Framed on commercial terms. This is audience expansion, not compliance box-ticking. Delivered in three to eight weeks.
Service and Operations
A working pass over your full guest journey: food and drink, atmosphere, transport, queueing, signage. Where the day breaks for the customer and where it pays back. Delivered in three to eight weeks.
How an engagement works
- Discovery. You brief us in two lines. We confirm scope, the one falsifiable question we are answering, and the success criteria. Scoping call within five working days.
- Analysis. We draw from the Collective panel, your own data where shared, and public-data baselines. Mystery Racegoer engagements run field visits in parallel.
- Delivery. A written report you can act on, with every recommendation specific, dated, and falsifiable. Plus a 30 to 90-minute verbal debrief.
- Follow-up. A short check-in six weeks after delivery: what you acted on, what shifted.
Why Courseside
Every finding is falsifiable and every engagement is guaranteed. Each claim in a Courseside report states a percentage, a count, or a delta — no "many", no "most", no "growing". Individual survey answers are always anonymised; what reaches your desk is aggregate patterns, never personal attribution. And if the engagement does not identify at least one actionable finding worth acting on, the fee is refunded in full — written into the engagement letter before any work begins.
We own and run our own structured, multi-tier racegoer panel — built in-house, not rented. Generalist firms read the racing audience from the outside. We read it from the inside: real, identified people, tiered by literacy, surveyed once a quarter, every quarter.
We are racing-fluent. You will not need to explain what "going" is, what a Grade 2 hurdle looks like in fixture-list terms, or why a Wednesday evening fixture converts differently to a Saturday afternoon.
We charge a fraction of the alternative. A generalist one-off racing market study from a large sports-marketing agency typically runs into the tens of thousands. A Courseside engagement is scoped per project, and the quarterly published report is included.
Risk reversal
No actionable finding by the deliverable date — full refund, no argument. Written into the engagement letter before any work begins.
Get in touch
Tell us in two lines what you are trying to figure out. We reply within two working days with whether we can help and a slot for a 30-minute scoping call. No obligation. No retainer discussion until you ask for one.
Or email [email protected] direct.